Tuesday Morning News

Three million. That’s how many Apple Watch units Apple has sold in the US up to July 10, which is exactly three months since pre-orders opened. MacRumors reports on data from Slice Intelligence, who say the Apple Watch Sport is the most popular model, with an estimated 1,875 Apple Watch Edition models sold. If you do the maths, three million Apple Watch units at an average selling price of $505 is a cool $1.5 billion in revenue, which doesn’t even include sales from outside the US.

The Wall Street Journal says Apple now makes 92% of all smartphone profits, even though it might not be the leader in terms of marketshare. Samsung is the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, with 82.4 million units shipped during Q1 2015 compared to Apple’s 61.2 million as reported by Ars Technica, but there’s no denying the fact the iPhone is king of the hill.

Digitimes is saying Apple will release the long-rumoured, larger-screened iPad in November. With production set to ramp up in September, a November timeframe seems plausible enough — but like any rumour, we’ve heard this story time and time again.

Apple has released an update for iTunes which fixes an issue relating to automatically switching iTunes Match tracks in your library to Apple Music editions, complete with their FairPlay DRM. The iTunes 12.2 update also lets you restore non-DRMed files to your iTunes library, and 9to5Mac takes you through the process.

Over at Macworld, Kirk McElhearn argues that iTunes has become a bloated mess of an app that tries to do way too many things. Perhaps Apple should take a leaf out of the iPhoto playbook and throw everything out and start again with a new app called Music — but perhaps that’s not the right solution either.

On his personal blog, McElhearn also says that Apple Music doesn’t display a history of tracks you’ve listened to, and for a music service that says it’s all about discovery, this is a huge mistake. The “Recently Played” playlist doesn’t update for Apple Music tracks.

Apple’s iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan focus on IPv6 support, even if it’s marginally slower than its IPv4 counterpart. Both public betas offer IPv6 as a priority.

The security improvements in OS X El Capitan are great for end users and all, but may prove to be roadblocks for developers doing things a little out of the ordinary. Sandboxing already cripples apps, in some circumstances, and the recent changes in OS X El Capitan are proving challenging for the developers of SuperDuper.

Speaking of backups, Stephen Hackett shares his backup strategy. A local Time Machine backup, offsite backups to hard drives and to the cloud, and a bootable clone created in varying frequencies keeps his data safe.

The Verge has a piece praising the original iPad for its near-indestructibility. They say it’s the perfect device for kids to use — easy to use, but hard to break.